Paraphrasing tools are getting more sophisticated

[quasihumanist]

2) Am I right to suspect that the grading standards for undergrads, ostensibly in the same disciplines, vary verrrryyyyy widely across our extremely variegated higher ed system in this country?   I am not sure that this would be the case in many if not most other countries.

My grading standards at my current university are about a full grade easier than my standards at good SLAC when I was a VAP, and pretty much were that way from semester 1.

[downer]

2) Am I right to suspect that the grading standards for undergrads, ostensibly in the same disciplines, vary verrrryyyyy widely across our extremely variegated higher ed system in this country?   I am not sure that this would be the case in many if not most other countries.

My grading standards at my current university are about a full grade easier than my standards at good SLAC when I was a VAP, and pretty much were that way from semester 1.

In the UK grading standards are basically uniform because grades and student work are looked over by external people.

In the US it is rare for there even to be uniform grading standards within a department. It does support the idea that the value of a US degree is not much about what students learn.

[Aster]

2) Am I right to suspect that the grading standards for undergrads, ostensibly in the same disciplines, vary verrrryyyyy widely across our extremely variegated higher ed system in this country?   I am not sure that this would be the case in many if not most other countries.

My grading standards at my current university are about a full grade easier than my standards at good SLAC when I was a VAP, and pretty much were that way from semester 1.

Grading standards should not change when you migrate between institutions. Student performance however, can and does change when you move around.

[downer]

2) Am I right to suspect that the grading standards for undergrads, ostensibly in the same disciplines, vary verrrryyyyy widely across our extremely variegated higher ed system in this country?   I am not sure that this would be the case in many if not most other countries.

My grading standards at my current university are about a full grade easier than my standards at good SLAC when I was a VAP, and pretty much were that way from semester 1.

Grading standards should not change when you migrate between institutions. Student performance however, can and does change when you move around.

I'd like that to be true. I try to live up to it myself. But ultimately it is not realistic for a host of reasons. A primary one is economic. Many schools serving students with all sorts of challenges would not graduate any students if they had the same standards as students who are highly talented and well prepared.

[jerseyjay]

In the UK grading standards are basically uniform because grades and student work are looked over by external people.

In the US it is rare for there even to be uniform grading standards within a department. It does support the idea that the value of a US degree is not much about what students learn.

In my experience (admittedly from several decades ago) in Britain, the socialization nature of higher education is even higher than in the U.S., with "the playing fields of Eton" and all that.

If I remember correctly, Benedict Anderson read classics at Kings College, Cambridge. In his memoir, he wrote that he found the entrance exam more difficult than anything he actually had to do while there. While it was certainly possible to get a good education at Oxbridge, that was not the main point.

In my experience at a Russell Group university (not Oxbridge), one's grades in individual courses didn't really matter so much as what sort of degree one got at the end (a double first, etc.)

Also, nobody pretended that all higher education in Britain was equal.

At the top were a few Oxbridge colleges mainly consisting of students from a few private (public) schools. Then there were other Oxbridge colleges.

Then there were other Russell Group universities.

Then there were Red Brick Universities.

Then are the New Universities.

When I was in Britain, everybody was obsessed with league tables and where one's school fit into it. I am not sure if the British system is any worse or better than the U.S. system (both of which have evolved over the last several decades) but my point is that in Britain, the role of universities is not just to impart knowledge but also to socialize people into a particular role/place in society--which is in fact the role of universities in most places.

[downer]

According to the Global Social Mobility Index, the US and the UK are pretty similar in their lack of social mobility. The US is slightly worse. Both are in the top 30. The higher ed system must have some role in that.

[Caracal]

An assignment that can get a passing grade with a paraphrasing tool or purchased paper is not a well-crafted assignment in my opinion. My assignments are both extremely specific and scaffolded-- you would have to both know the subject matter well and put in as much time as an actual student to get a decent grade on the work. I suppose that is possible, but seems like it would get very expensive and hard to arrange.

And yet there are apparently an awful lot of assignments and courses out there that can be passed through such methods.  I remember the old CHE discussion about the big paper ghostwriter self-expose that made the news some years back.  His slop-work was apparently all that many students needed to get a passing grade with scarcely any effort on the students' part. 

What permits this situation to develop?  For-profit schools (and others) that prioritize customer satisfaction over educational standards?  Overworked adjuncts who just don't have the time or incentive to design relatively cheat-proof assignments?  ROAD scholars?  Or maybe this happens mostly with lower-level courses, where the assignments are less sophisticated in the first place?

I think that if a student actually just put something through paraphrasing software and turned it in, they wouldn't get a passing grade on one of my papers because they wouldn't be anywhere close to the assignment. However, if they wrote parts of it to conform to the assignment, and then added in various paraphrased things for filler along with things they wrote themselves, that could certainly get a C. I give grades like that all the time to papers that start following the assignment and then wander off somewhere along the way.

I'm just not sure the student would really be saving all that much time and effort by the time they do that.

[downer]

I think the paraphrasing is more of an issue for online classes with weekly assignments rather than for papers. Those assignments tend to be more routine, aiming to show that that students did the reading.

Ultimately, students who cheat repeatedly are likely to get caught and then the instructor can go back to their previous assignments and get a sense of how much of their work is bogus. Students who just do it a little bit probably will get away with it. I don't really care about that.

So it's only a big problem for higher ed if there isn't a move to ever more online classes taught by underpaid teachers who don't have the time to track this stuff down.

[mleok]

It's an arms race, and ultimately, we're going to have to fight technology with technology. Generative adversarial networks, which were developed for unsupervised learning, can presumably also be used to learn which kinds of submissions are generated by specific artifical neural networks.

[downer]

I know of one school that stopped using plagiarism-detecting software in order to cut costs. Many schools are in financial difficulty and may not be able to afford the technology to detect other kinds of cheating. So the arms-race may be very one sided.

[jerseyjay]

I'm just not sure the student would really be saving all that much time and effort by the time they do that.

I tell my students that in order to cheat "well", i.e., in a way that is unlikely to be found out and which gets a good grade, it is usually work than just doing the assignment itself.

[mleok]

I'm just not sure the student would really be saving all that much time and effort by the time they do that.

I tell my students that in order to cheat "well", i.e., in a way that is unlikely to be found out and which gets a good grade, it is usually work than just doing the assignment itself.

I definitely feel that if students put as much effort into their work as they did trying to avoid work by cheating, they wouldn't need to cheat.

[kaysixteen]

I dunno, considerin' how much and how often many fora folks over the years have whined about having to grade, and more or less said they put in as little effort as possible at it, well...

[Caracal]

I'm just not sure the student would really be saving all that much time and effort by the time they do that.

I tell my students that in order to cheat "well", i.e., in a way that is unlikely to be found out and which gets a good grade, it is usually work than just doing the assignment itself.

I definitely feel that if students put as much effort into their work as they did trying to avoid work by cheating, they wouldn't need to cheat.

A lot of cheating stems from avoidance, anxiety and panic. Even students who may seem like they are motivated by laziness, probably have a fair amount of anxiety going on. Writing is hard, putting things through some paraphrasing website probably feels easier even if you have to modify it.

Again though, I have a hard time getting too worked up about this stuff. A student who uses one of these sites and massages various paraphrased material into something resembling the assigned paper is almost certainly capable of writing the actual paper and getting a similar or better grade. They probably don't even save themselves much time. All they've done is failed to acquire valuable skills.

[reverist]

What does 'total depravity' mean in the technical sense? And could it possibly be replaced with aggregate abasement? Because aggregate abasement is pleasingly alliterative.

Here it's referring to a point in the Synod of Dort, a 17th-century meeting settling the Arminian controversy (as opposed to Calvinist theology). The outcome of the Synod were five points that can be represented as an acronym, TULIP (the T being relevant here). This is all very simplified, but the students were simply to discuss the five points and their merits/critiques. When the relevant nouns were plausibly deciphered, most, if not all, of the student's submission was traceable to a portion of a chapter in a textbook, found online.

I do agree aggregate abasement is a lovely piece of alliteration, haha! "Total depravity" means something like, "Each person is so affected by sin such that every part of their existence is bent toward that, and they are incapable of responding to God or knowing him on their own." It's just that they needed to reflect on the historical doctrines that came out of this meeting. Agree with it, hate it, modify it, etc., none of that particularly mattered. They just needed to interact with it and not the paraphrased version of an online site doing it for them!